Drama is the spine of cinema, the genre where performance, script and direction have nowhere to hide. From the courtroom pressure of 12 Angry Men to the generational weight of The Godfather, it has always rewarded patience and attention. See what Macca makes of the best and worst of it below.
Rating: 3.0★
There's something genuinely rare about The Bigamist. A film from 1953, made under the watchful eye of the Production Code, about a man who marries two women and somehow manages to make you feel sorry for him rather than furious at him. That's either a neat
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment early in Winter Light when Bergman simply lets his camera sit in a Swedish church and watch a Sunday service play out, nearly in full, in real time. No cuts to spare you, no intercutting to build tension, just the sermon, the sparse congregation, the
Rating: 3.0★
"Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?" It's one of the most quoted final lines in film history, and the fact that you probably already know it tells you everything about the strange position Little Caesar occupies. This is a film that matters enormously,
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in Ema where the camera just sits with its subject as she moves through a neon-lit Santiago street, reggaeton thumping beneath her, and you realise you're not going to be given any easy way into this woman. She's magnetic
Rating: 4.0★
What does it mean to want to be seen? That's the question humming underneath every frame of Salaam Cinema, and it's one I haven't been able to shake since watching it. Mohsen Makhmalbaf turns a simple premise, open auditions for a film in Tehran,
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of Pickpocket that I can see myself loving. A morally complex character study of a young Parisian drifter who transforms petty theft into something approaching philosophy, shot in stark black-and-white, directed by one of French cinema's most distinctive voices. On paper,
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment in Josep where the animation itself seems to breathe, where the rough, expressive lines and painterly washes of colour feel less like a stylistic choice and more like a confession. It's the kind of filmmaking that stops you short and reminds you what
Rating: 3.0★
Let's be honest: Kevin Costner doing a Midwestern accent in medieval England shouldn't work. And it doesn't, really. But here's the thing about Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It doesn't need to work perfectly to be a genuinely good time.
Rating: 3.0★
There's one sequence in Fire in the Sky that I genuinely cannot shake, and I've been turning it over in my head ever since the credits rolled. You'll know it when you see it. Extended, clinical, suffocating. It treats the alien abduction not as
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment in The Cameraman where Buster Keaton shares a tiny changing cubicle with a large stranger, and the two men contort themselves into increasingly impossible arrangements trying to get dressed without making eye contact. It's brilliantly choreographed, genuinely funny, and over in about ninety
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment in Frances Ha where the title character describes her ideal relationship as two people who are so in sync they don't even need to talk across a crowded room, they just look at each other and know. It's the kind of
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment in "Topsy Turvy" where the animation just explodes off the screen: crowds swirling, colours colliding, the whole frame crackling with a kind of joyful, controlled chaos. It's one of the most technically dazzling sequences Disney has ever produced, and it'
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